Assessing Community Contributions to Sustainable Food Systems: Dietitians Leverage Practice, Process and Paradigms
- PDF / 582,060 Bytes
- 27 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 44 Downloads / 121 Views
Assessing Community Contributions to Sustainable Food Systems: Dietitians Leverage Practice, Process and Paradigms Liesel Carlsson, et al. [full author details at the end of the article] Accepted: 28 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
Food systems are not sustainable, and efforts to address this are paralyzed by the complex networks of food system actors and factors that interact across sectoral and geographic scales. Actions at the community level can positively contribute toward globally sustainable food systems (SFS). Assessing such contributions has two central challenges: 1) a lack of methods that support alignment between communities and across scales, balanced against the need to involve the community in developing relevant indicators; and 2) the absence of adequate, fine grained data relevant to the community. Addressing these two challenges, this paper illustrates a proposed procedure that supports community engagement with, and assessment of, their contributions. Engaged by a community of Canadian dietitians, researchers used the Delphi Inquiry method, guided by the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development, to address the first challenge, and causal loop diagrams informed by the Cultural Adaptation Template to address the second. Indicators were developed for dietitian-identified actions and outcomes for SFS. Modeling indicator interactions provide insight into how some actions are influenced by and reinforce the value placed on SFS within the professional cultural paradigm, as well as priority areas for action and measurement. Process-oriented assessment is useful in the context of partial and subjective understandings of a dynamic system, and supports continual adjustment in action. This article offers theoretical and practical insight for community engagement in addressing some of the systemic challenges in food systems. It accommodates communitybased knowledge, applies process-indicators, and emphasizes the importance of cultural paradigms as a driving force of community-level actions, and overall system change. Under current conditions, facilitating SFS literacy among dietitians can amplify adaptations for broader SFS development. Keywords Sustainable food systems . Sustainable diets . Dietitians . Indicators . Assessment . Community . Framework for strategic sustainable development . Cultural adaptation template . Delphi inquiry method
Introduction Food systems are major contributors to unsustainable conditions in our ecological (Aleksandrowicz et al. 2016; Tara Garnett 2013; Gerber 2013; Willett et al. 2019) and social
Systemic Practice and Action Research
(IPES-Food 2015) systems. Swift, decisive, and collaborative action toward sustainable food systems are called for (EAT n.d.; Willett et al. 2019), but, such efforts are easily paralyzed by the complexity of the issue, involving networks of food system actors and factors that interact across sectoral and geographic scales. At global and national levels, progress has been made toward developing comprehensive sustainable foo
Data Loading...
